Billionaire Karl-Erivan Haub disappeared in 2018 at the age of 58 after failing to return from a mountain lift in Switzerland and was declared dead three years later.
Now, however, Christian Haub, his younger brother, is under investigation by German authorities, who believe he may have lied when he testified to a district court in Cologne that he had no evidence that his brother remained among the living.
According to Newsweek, which cited reporting from Zeit Online, a German publication generally considered reliable, the younger Haub "is accused of having had reliable evidence that his brother could still be alive," in contrast to his testimony to the contrary.
"In May 2021, he swore in an affidavit that he possessed no information that his missing sibling could still be alive," Newsweek reported.
Karl-Erivan Haub was officially declared dead that month, leaving his brother as "sole CEO" of Tenglemann Group, a privately held company considered to be worth billions.
Christian Haub denied the accusation, of course, and the state officials stressed to Newsweek that Karl-Erivan Haub's death remained a matter of public record, if not of actual fact.
But it gets juicier: French broadcaster RTL, which has been investigating the disappearance, actually filed a criminal complaint last year after journalists determined that Karl-Erivan Haub might have faked his death.
"The team said that these events could be connected to a younger Russian woman with links to Russian intelligence -- allegedly Veronika Ermilova -- who worked for an event management agency, and with whom Karl-Erivan Haub had allegedly been leading a secret double life," Newsweek reported.
"'There are strong indications that he could have caused his disappearance intentionally' and 'at least parts of his family were aware of it and, against their better judgment, kept this secret from the Cologne District Court and the public,' investigative journalist Liv von Boetticher, who was part of the RTL team, told German magazine Capital in an interview published on April 15," the outlet said.
Boetticher claimed to have photos of the elder Haub in Moscow in 2021, nearly three years after his disappearance and only months before he was officially declared dead.
"To my knowledge, these photos were available to Christian Haub at the time when he gave a sworn statement to the Cologne district court in May 2021 that he had 'no reliable evidence' that his brother was still alive," she said, according to Newsweek.
"Our suspicion is that dealings with Russia or with Russian business partners could have got Karl-Erivan in trouble in the West," she added.
His supposed mistress, however, denied both that she had any ties to Russian intelligence and that she had had anything but a business relationship with Karl-Erivian Haub.
Her denials, however, all appeared in media outlets known to be slanted in favor of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government. (On the other hand, those are just about the only news outlets remaining in Russia.)
"No, I'm married, no one ran to me," she told one such outlet, according to the U.K.'s Daily Mail.
"There is no billionaire in my circle, I am married, I have a child," she told another.
"I'm married, nobody ran away to me," she told a third, referring to the news reports about her as "all some unverified fake."
"I'm not an FSB agent, I'm not a spy," she said.
Which, of course, is all what one might expect an FSB agent hiding a supposedly dead billionaire to say. "Today's denials from Ermilova may only deepen the suspicions regarding Haub," the Mail suggested.
Ya think?
